The left has made demons out of the wealthy Koch brothers, Charles and David, routinely depicting them as secretive right-wing fanatics who pour millions into reactionary causes. The demonization of these two men – who actually support same-sex marriage and opposed the Patriot Act, and most of whose philanthropy goes to mainstream causes such as the United Negro College Fund and to apolitical cultural institutions such as the the American Ballet Theater, New York City Ballet, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and American Museum of Natural History – has become a staple of left-wing propaganda and supposedly objective articles throughout the establishment media.

Meanwhile, the true extremist moneybags gets off almost scot-free. George Soros is the financial father of the American far left, but the American right – for whatever reason – has spent far less time examining and assessing his actual activities than the left has spent brutalizing the Kochs for imaginary offenses. As a result, Americans who have been brainwashed into thinking that the Kochs are buying elections for the religious right (in fact, they’re libertarians who have tried to counter the impact of the religious right on Republican politics) have no idea just how huge a behind-the-scenes role George Soros has played in the Democratic Party, serving as a veritable Wizard of Oz who’s back there pulling the strings almost everywhere you look.

While the Kochs “had $308 million tied up in their foundation and institute in 2011,” according to a January 2015 article in the Washington Times, “Soros’ two largest foundations manage almost $3 billion in assets per year.”

But let’s start at the beginning. It seems almost like a Rosebud-like key to George Soros’s character that his father was an enthusiast for the artificial language Esperanto, concocted by L.L. Zamenhof in the late nineteenth century in hopes that people around the world would exchange their native tongues for his invention and thus usher in a utopia of international post-Tower of Babel harmony. Soros’s father was such a devotee of Esperanto that he actually changed the family’s last name from Schwartz: Soros is in fact an Esperanto verb meaning “will soar.” Think about it: is it surprising that a boy brought up by such a tilter at windmills would grow up into a far-left utopian, putting his billions to work for “social justice” causes of the sort that only a radical nutjob could get behind?

So much for Soros’s father. What about his mother? He himself has described her as having been “quite anti-Semitic and ashamed of being Jewish.” She eventually converted to Catholicism. “Given the culture in which we lived,” Soros later told an interviewer, “being Jewish was a clear-cut stigma, a disadvantage, a handicap. And therefore, she always had the desire to transcend it, to escape it.” That’s some “therefore”: Soros acts as if it’s simply a matter of common sense, in such a situation, to ditch one’s pride, one’s principle, and one’s people and act out of pure expediency

There’s another detail from Soros’s early life that also seems illuminating – in a distinctly chilling way. During the Nazi occupation of his homeland, Hungary, Soros’s father paid a government official named Baumbach to take in George and to identify him as his Christian godson to keep the Jewish boy from getting nabbed by the Nazis. Baumbach’s job, as it happens, involved going from door to door, deporting Hungarian Jews and confiscating their property. The young Soros often tagged along with him while he was carrying out this task. Asked in 1998 whether he’d ever felt guilty about his involvement in this activity, Soros said: “I was only a spectator … I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.” If that’s not unsettling enough for you, check this out: Soros has said that the Nazi occupation of Hungary was “probably the happiest year of my life… a happy-making, exhilarating experience.”

What we’re dealing with here, in short, is a very disturbing individual – a moral preacher who nonetheless comes off as chillingly amoral; a man who purports to be motivated by high ideals but who, during his formative years, encountered absolute evil and found it absolutely thrilling.

More to come.